Thursday, March 25, 2010

Does Eating Meat Contribute to Global Warming?

Does eating meat contribute to climate change -- at least, more than existing as a human being and eating vegetarian?

Some studies have said as much, and some environmentalists have jumped on this and declared that we should all give up meat.

There are good reasons not to eat meat, but a new study by Frank Mitloehner of U California at Davis (which is, incidentally, one of the best agricultural sciences schools in the world) indicates that meat production doesn't contribute nearly as much to the atmosphere's GHG content as originally thought.

Dr Frank Mitloehner, from the University of California at Davis (UCD), said meat and milk production generates less greenhouse gas than most environmentalists claim and that the emissions figures were calculated differently to the transport figures, resulting in an “apples-and-oranges analogy that truly confused the issue”.

The meat figure had been reached by adding all greenhouse-gas emissions associated with meat production, including fertiliser production, land clearance, methane emissions and vehicle use on farms, whereas the transport figure had only included the burning of fossil fuels

Naturally, in the world of the Climate Cling-ons, this represents a vast conspiracy by wimpy vegetarian liberals to force their morals on the world, a huge error by sympathetic scientists who conspired to hide data and manipulate numbers to get the conclusion they want. (The label is "Cow-gate," if you're trying to keep up with the Clingons.)

It can't simply be that a new study found a different result, or used superior methods, learned via past studies and analyses, to reach a different conclusion, or that an earlier study was wrong. After all, every scientific paper published is supposed to be a holy writ, completely accurate in all assumptions and conclusions without the possibility of revision or further analysis or more thinking.

It is, of course, a completely false position that shows a lack of any understanding of scientific history.

By these standards Niels Bohr was a criminal because his model of the hydrogen atom was proved wrong. Paul Dirac was a fraud because his equation for the electron predicted a magnetic moment of 2 and not the value we know today of g = 2.00231930436. He should have been strung up and fed to wolves!

Of course, Bohr and Dirac had some of the most important intellectual achievements in history, and none of the Clingons has accomplished a millionth of what they did. But because a result is not completely and totally accurate to all degrees the very first time, we must assume a conspiracy.

The amazing thing is that this doesn't seem to embarrass the Clingons.